1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus which generates information required to manage an overlay print process for overlaying and printing an image on a print sheet on which form contents are printed in advance, a control method thereof, a computer program and an information processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Nowadays, business organizations draw growing interest on internal control, and demand necessity of visualization of business processes. In such an environment, a print (overlay print) process which overlays a predetermined form and data in a text format (field data) defined for each page is used. As for the form, a paper sheet (preprinted sheet) on which its contents (form contents) are printed in advance is used. This overlay print process handles confidential information and personal information very often, and the importance on thorough control activities is growing in terms of prevention of errors and corruptions.
In the related art, for the purpose of suppressing information leakage and illicit use with respect to printed products, a print server holds, together with log information, print data processed by a printing apparatus such as a printer, MFP, or the like in the form of text or image data. Then, it is a common practice to introduce a system which, if perchance information has been leaked, searches print data saved in the print server to specify a leak source (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-252299).
However, when a printed product overlay printed on the preprinted sheet is duplicated or leaked for some cause, the printer server in the conventional system saves only information of the field data. For this reason, for example, a very long time needs to be spent to search for and specify the time, person, and place of overlay printing of a printed product to which such a problem is traced back.
This is, for example, for the following reasons.
(1) Since the print server does not save any information of a form (pre-printed sheet), a search process based on form information cannot be made.
(2) Since there are many types of forms that use identical field data, printed products cannot be sufficiently limited by the search process based only on the field data information.
(3) Visual checking of printed products by the user not only lacks certitude but also is impossible in practice.
FIGS. 14A and 14B show examples of a plurality of different forms using identical field data, and overlay print results. FIG. 14A shows identical field data 502 to be applied to a plurality of different forms 501. In the conventional arrangement, using this field data 502 for each of the plurality of different forms 501, overlay print results 503 in which the field data 502 are printed on the respective forms can be obtained.